Photo: Science Photo Library RF
1 AMPTP Reaches Tentative Contract Agreement With WGA
After a marathon week of negotiations (and 146 days on the picket lines), the Writers Guild Of America and the Alliance Of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached a tentative agreement yesterday that is expected to put an end to the ongoing writers’ strike in film and television. Insiders say the majority of the weekend’s work belonged to the lawyers, who spent time finalizing the language of the deal. “We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional,” wrote the WGA negotiating committee in an email to its membership shortly after news first broke. Details of the deal are currently under wraps until guild leaders vote Tuesday to formally end the strike, and the WGA was quick to declare that “no one is to return to work” until the WGA gives them the all-clear. And while this deal isn’t the official end of either the writers’ or actors’ strikes, it does seem that it might be the beginning of the end. Industry insiders expect this deal will help actors’ union SAG-AFTRA speed along their own negotiations with the AMPTP. But if the Tuesday vote upholds the deal, writers and studios will be allowed to once again work together to develop new and suspended projects.
2 NASA Probe Delivers Asteroid Sample Back To Earth
Seven years after it left Earth, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a quick visit back home yesterday, staying just long enough to drop off a gift. The probe ejected a capsule the size of a microwave oven that contained almost nine ounces of rock and soil from the asteroid Bennu. The sample is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old and is the largest sample of an asteroid ever returned to Earth. While scientists are excited to study the sample in a hyper-clean room built just for the mission at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, some people’s attention is being captured by the fact that Bennu has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2182. As for the OSIRIS_REx craft, it’s on its way back into space to study another asteroid.
3 There is a New Surge of Migrants on the Southern Border
They come from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan, India and dozens of other countries, a moving global village of hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande and slipping through gaps in the border wall at a pace of nearly 9,000 people a day, one of the highest rates of unlawful crossings in months. Despite new border barriers and thickets of razor wire, risk of deportation and pleas for patience, a resurgent tide of men, women and children is not waiting. Driven by desperation, families and individuals are pushing across the southern border and past new efforts by the Biden administration to keep migrants waiting until they secure hard-to-get appointments to enter the nation with permission. The influx is creating a humanitarian and political crisis that stretches from packed migrant processing facilities in border states to major American cities struggling to house and educate the new families. Though many get through, thousands are being sent back across the border or on flights to their home countries. But from Texas to California, more than two dozen migrants who have entered illegally in recent days said they could not afford to wait.